Powering Through Your Work Day with The Right Tools

In a creative slump? Do you feel like you’re in a rut, and you just can’t keep your creative juices flowing? Do you feel overwhelmed with your workload, even if that’s what you’ve been doing for several months now? Maybe it’s time to get the right productivity tools to help you with your day-to-day tasks, so that you can refresh your mind and be able to perform at your best once again. The following list contains some of the most helpful productivity software and applications you can get online, to help you manage your time, your workload, and even your teammates.

Focus on Tasks that Matter

The first step to getting over your work day slump is focusing on the right tasks first. Sometimes, all you need to keep your creative juices flowing is to untangle the unnecessary tasks and reveal which ones inspire you to work more. It’s like untangling your earphones after you take them out of your pocket: haste makes it more tangled, so choose which ends to pull apart first. To help you focus on the right tasks first, you can use productivity apps like Freedom to restrict your access to certain sites, software and apps while you work. Just select your devices, set a schedule on when you need to restrict their usage, start focusing more on the tasks at hand.

Another method would be to work on tasks for short periods, and taking a break when that time ends. You can use Focus Booster to help you with this technique, setting a period for each task and having a clear goal in mind whenever you set your schedule. You can manage your time wisely by planning tasks ahead, as well as setting a break to refresh your mind.

Auditing Your Work Hours, Even When You’re Working from Home

Since we’ve already lightly touched up on task scheduling and time management, the next tip would be about tracking your working hours for every project, specific tasks, and other work-related activities. You might not know it, but some of things that you do on a daily basis are eating up a lot of your time without you knowing it. One application that you could get to help you audit your work hours is Toggl, a time tracker that’s easy to use and understand. Turn it on and it tracks your work in real time. You can generate easy-to-understand reports to see your progress.

If you’re a bit budget-conscious, you can just get TopTracker, a free time-tracking application without any version limitations that forces you to upgrade to access certain features. It comes with all the bells and whistles of a time tracking software, like timers, screenshot and webcam shot features, all for free.

Time Doctor is an awesome time tracking and productivity monitoring tool designed to help you reduce wasted hours at work. Apart from time tracking, it also provides features like monitoring screenshots, tracking web and app usage, payroll and many more to make sure you get a lot more done each day.

Integrating Communications Features on Your Business Applications

Another cause of having a workday slump is the burnout from switching between different software and applications vital for your work. Imagine working on your CRM, and switching to your messaging app so that you can coordinate with your team, then opening your calendar to check your free time to set up a meeting. Just juggling between these programs could cause undue stress, eating up both your time and mental fortitude. One way to solve this is to integrate communications features on your existing business applications, so that you won’t have to switch software or jump from application to application just to coordinate with your team or manage your calendar. RingCentral, a cloud communications provider servicing business of all sizes, gives you exactly that. Through their app integrations, you can bring communications capabilities to your everyday business applications, like sales and support software, cloud storage software, and more.

When you’re suffering from a workday slump or your creative juices simply stopped flowing, you can refer to the lists above on possible ways to get you going again. Get the right tools for your day-to-day tasks so that you won’t have trouble keeping track of your tasks, your time, and your productivity.

Guest Author: Francis has been writing for more than a decade now, focusing on Digital Marketing in the last couple of years. He is currently in charge of writing web-optimized content for RingCentral, an industry-leading cloud phone systems provider. Francis is also a voracious reader, spending most of his free time immersed on fictional worlds. You can reach him through Twitter.